1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the field of content visualization, editing, formatting and printing. More specifically, the invention relates to computer architecture and user interface for providing a virtual press run thus achieving realistic document visualization and achieving a more robust set of editing and printing options.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic document production involves developing content, preparing a document layout and outputting the document, typically in the form of a print job. A number of computer applications provide the necessary tools to accomplish basic content preparation, but do not provide a user with the adequate resources to visualize, edit and format the content so that the visual preview of the document on a computer interface actually represents how a completed print job looks. Furthermore, existing publishing applications do not offer a user with adequate editing or formatting options for a print job.
Most content creation applications include a printing options interface and a print preview tool. However, the printing options interface does not adequately show the user how the selected options will affect the appearance and layout of the actual finished printed and optionally bound document. Likewise, the print preview tool oftentimes does not provide an acceptable representation of what the print job will actually look like. Present solutions to this problem include conducting multiple test runs or outsourcing document creation to a specialist, both of which are a waste of time and financial resources.
Furthermore, typical content production applications only offer a user a basic degree of customization for a print job. For example, common presentation creation applications allow a user to print multiple slides on a single page. However, these applications fall short when a user desires to vary how many slides are to appear on each page throughout the whole print job. Similarly, content creation applications do not provide a user with an easy way to rotate source media, change media size, or alter document folding options. In these situations the user is forced to choose between foregoing the desired degree of customization and creating multiple print jobs to achieve the desired goals.
Additionally, known printing systems and printing solutions do not provide users with adequate opportunity to print in an environmentally responsible fashion. From a printing perspective, being environmentally responsible is primarily about using less paper. Reducing paper can help companies in two ways: first and foremost, they can reduce their costs; secondly, they can leverage their initiative to save paper as an environmentally friendly activity that will impress customers and employees.
However, individuals that want to produce booklets must use sophisticated technology for manual page imposition and they must be skilled in the use and application of the technology. Also, in order to create printed booklets that are printed on both sides of the paper, and have a combination of different pages with different numbers of pages per sheet, imposed into a booklet requires skilled knowledge and extensive manipulation of the pages or document. Therefore, there is a need to develop a set of tools to automate the process of printing documents that will reduce the amount of paper used in an organization.
Finally, most known document production applications do not provide a robust user interfaces for visualization, formatting and editing print jobs.